Schlesinger Newsletter

Countdown to Suffrage

In her recently published book, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (Viking, 2018), the popular historian Elaine Weiss has written about the six weeks before the 19th amendment passed in Tennessee. The amendment had been pushed through Congress and needed 36 states legislatures to ratify it, which Tennessee did during the summer of 1920.

If the amendment was defeated in Tennessee, momentum would be lost, and the antisuffrage forces might gain strength. “The suffragists rightfully suspected that the nation was on a swing toward isolationism and reactionary policies,” Weiss said in an interview from her home in Baltimore. “They knew if they didn’t get the vote then, it would be delayed a very long time.”

In researching her book, Weiss relied on several collections of suffrage papers at the Schlesinger—including the Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, the Sue Shelton White Papers, and many others. One of the collections she found most helpful was the Betty Gram Swing Papers, a then recent gift to the library from Pam Swing, the granddaughter of the suffragist Betty Gram. Weiss was able to meet the granddaughter and to hear stories about her grandmother’s work as a national organizer. “Pam sorted out the papers that she thought would be useful to me and guided me through the unprocessed papers,” Weiss said. “That’s the goldmine of the Schlesinger, with new things coming in.”

Weiss said she was surprised by the sometimes-racist invective of the suffragists. “It’s clear that the abolition movement and suffrage were sibling movements,” she said, “but then there’s this terrible split after the Civil War, when women are told that universal suffrage is not going to happen, that the nation can only take one reform at a time, and women are told to wait.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony “descended into depths of vile racist rhetoric,” she writes in the book, “going so far as to warn against the ‘horrible outrages’ against white women that were sure to follow the black man’s enfranchisement and elevation in society.”

It’s a fight that she thinks can be instructive to today’s activists. “This is a book about grassroots activists,” Weiss said. “Suffragists for the most part were not high-born women. Susan Anthony was a schoolteacher. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was well read, but she was a house mother. She had seven kids.”

Weiss sees a parallel between the suffragists and the young people leading today’s fight for gun control. “They’re making demands that seem impossible to some people, but so were the suffragists. It was considered totally impossible, when women first demanded the vote.”

August 26 is a special day around Radcliffe and the Schlesinger Library. On that day in 1920, the 19th Amendment, giving American women the vote, formally became part of the US Constitution. The day also marks the founding of the Schlesinger Library in 1943.

A woman would never become a senator or president, the early suffragists argued, until Americans learned to respect women for mature wisdom and experience. How, then, did the women’s suffrage movement in the United States come to be associated with youth?

After much brainstorming about an exhibit to celebrate the Library’s 75th anniversary, a plan emerged. Loosely patterned after the British Museum’s popular podcast A History of the World in 100 Objects, the exhibit would include 75 objects or groups of objects.

Related Collections

Maud Wood Park, who graduated from Radcliffe College in 1898, was a key figure in the suffrage movement. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, she served as the first president of the League of Women Voters.

Best known as an iconic women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the campaign for women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony (1820‒1906) was also involved in a number of other 19th century social reform movements, including temperance, abolition, and labor rights.

Suffragist, women’s rights activist, and author of the original Equal Rights Amendment, Alice Paul (1885–1977) devoted her entire life advocating for women’s suffrage and equal rights for women. She was the main architect of the campaign in the 1910s to pass the nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution which gave women the right to vote.

The Blackwell family, four generations of whom are represented in the Schlesinger Library's papers, played important roles in 19th- and 20th-century American social reform movements: abolition of slavery, women’s rights, woman’s suffrage, and temperance.